Word: auteurs
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...auteur theory of film criticism has gone through many transformations since its initial conception. For Andre Bazin and his Cahiers du Cinema scions in the 40's and 50's, approaching a film as if it were creatively guided by a single intelligence-preferably that of the director-provided opportunities for scholarly, disciplined film thought. Just as a modern writer is judged more by an oeuvre, his body of work, than by a single masterpiece, the Cahiers critics traced continual directorial themes and motifs, evaluating the creator's relationship to his subject by the manner in which it was visually...
Among the "classics" canonized in Confessions of a Cultist are Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Hitchcock's The Birds, Preminger's Advise and Consent. All are auteur genre items; Sarris rarely has the flexibility of such British auteurists as Raymond Durgnat to admit that non-auteurs can produce great films. Each has raw narrative material of questionable significance, and a blatant commercial bent which made the few respectable critics feel rotten and cheated the morning after, unless trash was all they expected...
Well, given an auteur who's also a good director, he will manage to come up with as good an explication of his films as most critics; possibly, because of his fine eve for visuals, a better one. He does champion such out-of-current mood directors as Peckinpah and Renoir; he is generally concerned with instituting fashion according to his own "impassioned" integrity rather than merely following the fashionable (though his recent 2001 recantation was curious indeed). With such developments as his labeling of Fellini as the "Busby Berkeley of metaphysics," and a latent inclination towards admirable historical research...